And therefore I say to you ‘Have faith that whatever you ask for in prayer is already granted you, and you will find that it will be.’
it will be so
according to your vision
that sees tomorrow today
and past partials completedit will be so
according to your vision
where all is joined at root
and released to soarit will be so
according to your vision
so see your ophthalmologist
prophet on a regular basisit will be so
according to your vision
if you don’t see outer shells
you’ll miss your inner pearlit will be so
according to your vision
ask according to your vision
receive according to your vision
Prayer is too often like a talisman hung around your neck. Whatever you “pray and ask” for is already on the way. This continues the encouragement to keep on through thick and thin. In Mark’s time there was both thick and thin when there was too much wilderness and too little.
This construct has allowed too many, though, to blame the pray-er if the ask is not fulfilled in a New York minute. It also brings into play the false idea that one has to pray for approved items—another excuse when prayers appear to not come true.
The biggest difficulty is what is termed a Prayer Warrior. With enough intensity and numbers of prayers, we can get our way. There is no listening here, just demanding.
Of note is an assumption that we will attend to previous times prayer has occurred in Mark. Most often it is in the context of Jesus going apart to do some wilderness praying. After such came the expressions of power in stilling storms and bringing peace into their midst. A case can be made that every healing is a variation on a prayer form, an act of prayer.
One downside to this verse by verse approach comes when there are parallelisms in adjoining verses. For instance, it is very important to help us move away from seeing prayer as an oral exercise, an incantation, and move toward an intersectionality approach to life’s perplexities, that prayer be intimately connected with forgiveness, which is one of the modalities of healing.